


Eyes like Stars

by SailFyre



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, Marauders' Era, Slytherin Pride
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 02:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11660010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailFyre/pseuds/SailFyre
Summary: Molly, Fabian, and Gideon Prewett had a much younger sister who goes to school and ends up friends with unexpected people.





	Eyes like Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirgewithoutmusic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/gifts).



When Evangeline was two months and six days old, her older sister started Hogwarts and her twin brothers began their third year. Molly wrote their mother with stories of magic and strict teachers, their brothers’ pranks and passed O.W.L.’s and, later, a boy named Arthur Weasley. Evangeline reread these letters when she was still in her flower girl’s dress, eight years old and her sister was gone.

Less than a year later she was nine and an aunt and there were only two years left until she could start doing magic that didn’t involve broomsticks or potions. (She was quite good at both, but her best friends would be better.) She didn’t experiment much in Potions, not since she’d burnt down the hen house. She wanted to play Chaser but first years couldn’t play and it was so unfair and she didn’t get it.

Ten whole years old and she was holding another nephew and starting to wonder if she’d ever have nieces--cause Gideon and Fabian still weren’t married and Molly had two boys. Evangeline was making less potions and flying more often because it was so freeing and she had to have something to call her own. She counts down the days until she turns eleven and her Hogwarts letter comes and she’ll finally get to go.

Eleven and Ev’s in Diagon Alley again but this time it’s different because she’s clutching a Hogwarts supply list and she’s one of them. In Ollivanders’ she meets a boy with straight black hair and wide grey eyes who says he has to be in Slytherin. (Evangeline has had a sister in Gryffindor, but her mother was in Slytherin and her father and brothers Ravenclaws.) She mentions her mother and the boy visibly relaxes.

“Maybe you’ll be in Slytherin too,” he says and she nods vigorously because he obviously needs a friend will you just look at the way his mother treats him and his brother. She gets her wand (oak, 9 ¾ inches, unicorn tail hair, flexible) and they go to Eeylops’ so she can get an owl. Rowena is black, pitch-black, and named for a Hogwarts founder.

 

Evangeline doesn’t know which house she’ll be in because she’s got nerve and ambition but she’s also fairly loyal and questions everything. But the owl is a she and Ev’s always hated the name Helga. By the time she’s waving from the train, though, she knows she won’t be in Hufflepuff because she doesn’t want to be in Gryffindor. Loyalty is good, but so is self-preservation, and this boy named Regulus needs her, so if she can manage it she’ll be in his house. 

She won’t show all her cards. Sitting with Reg on the train, she pretends not to know where she wants to go, who she wants to be. Ev is proud to be able to say she’s pureblood, but doesn’t know what it means. Yet. That’ll come later.

Across the lake, into the Great Hall, she realizes that all of her relatives except one are either in Ravenclaw or Slytherin now that her siblings have left. Prewetts are in Ravenclaw, Blacks belong in Slytherin. Except for Regulus’ brother, who for reasons unknown is in Gryffindor, a proud and cocky second-year. He grins at her. He knows where her sister was sorted. Ev pretends she doesn’t notice and falls in next to Regulus. Sirius grins wider.

Family isn’t everything, just a close second to magic. Regulus is sorted Slytherin after almost a full minute on the stool, visibly relieved. And Sirius is grinning, presumably grateful for the Hat’s hesitation. Half the class later, Ev is on the stool and the Hat is asking where? She says Slytherin because the song said true friends and that’s what she and Reg are, so that’s where she’ll go.  
A lazy sixth-year boy with a girl’s hair moves up for her, but she goes to the other side to sit with Regulus. (Sirius isn’t smiling anymore.) 

“Isn’t your sister the one who married the Weasleys’ youngest?” He questions with a sneer, so she hits him. Breaks his nose. Arthur might be a little odd, with his obsession with Muggles, but family is family and she’ll do what she must. Yes, she recognizes he’ll be married to her cousin, Sorted ten minutes before her, but he’s not family yet. So she breaks his nose. He gives her detention for a month.

Regulus says that’s a record for fastest time to get detention, and a boy with black hair walks down the table to introduce himself as Snape, Severus Snape, and wasn’t she supposed to be a Gryffindor? (She almost hits him for that alone.) “I’m not my sister,” she says, though eyes that are. Ev is aware that she looks like Molly, is proud of it most days, but her hair is much less red, much more brown, and she is half a Black. Trust me, I belong in Slytherin, she shoots back, and Reg frowns at Sev for the the first time of many.

That night, she gets to know her cousin Narcissa for the first time really in the dorms. How she dreads marrying Pretty-Boy Malfoy. Her favorite song. Her knack for broomstick riding. (That doesn’t surprise Ev; it runs in families.) 

And on the morning of September 2nd, she gets letters from her sister and mother. One asks if she’s sure she’ll be happy in Slytherin, if it’s where she belongs; the other congratulates her on being independent and having nobody make her decisions for her, following in Mom’s footsteps.

Classes whirl by, Sev tries out for Quidditch but doesn’t make the team, Evangeline ignores Sirius while talking animatedly to Reg, and James Potter wonders who this girl even is, talking to Regulus but not his best friend, Regulus’ brother. Potions is easy, flying is easy, Charms and Transfiguration are fun, Herbology doesn’t have a point except to learn how to grow the plants used in Potions, and Ev and Cissa stay awake late at night talking.

Sirius tries talking to Ev in the halls--”Hey cuz,” he says, falling in beside her after Charms--but is coolly rebuffed. She knows her loyalties. Sirius is a black sheep, and talking to him would be disloyal to Regulus. 

And Sev hates him and James Potter passionately, and she and Sev and Regulus are are a trio that will be echoed years later: two boys and a girl, the loyal one, the one who’s good at Quidditch, the smart one.

Ev is the first one to make a perfect cure for boils...in her year. She still flies, but on school brooms, not her own beloved Silver Arrow.

Suddenly, it’s almost Halloween. Ev wonders where two months went, studying Second-Year Potions with Lily Evans (Muggleborn, but she still doesn’t understand what that means). They get Severus to join them, even though he’s practically O.W.L. level already. Evangeline sees the way he looks at Lily’s dark red hair, her bright green eyes, but isn’t sure she understands that either. Or if she wants to.

Their study sessions are usually interrupted by Regulus laughing (can’t you see it’s a beautiful day out, come flying with me) or crying (he called James the best brother anyone could ask for). Ev dismisses the first one (usually) but is sympathetic to the last one. No matter how much she loves being a snake, her sister is still her role model, and her sister will always be a Gryffindor.

By November, after two and a half months of knowing his friends, Evangeline corners Remus Lupin in the far corner of the library to explain how she sussed out his “furry little problem.” (The Marauders will steal her phrasing years later, but she started it.)

He stares at her, aghast, as she shows him the lunar charts for the last forty-five days (three full moons contained).

“How’d you guess?” She shrugs. It’s basic logic, really, and getting Lily to rant about how the only reasonable one is sick sometimes isn’t hard. After she swears not to tell, they head for their respective tables and friends. 

When she goes to sit on the Astronomy Tower to stare at the moon, her friends leave her alone. She traces her mom’s family through the stars and thanks heaven that she wasn’t Cassiopeia. (She almost was.) She finds Regulus and then finds Sirius instead of the other way around. She doesn’t find Cissa because Cissa doesn’t have a star. There’s a constellation named Narcissus, but that’s a boy and thus not her friend.

She comes down and gets into the common room mere seconds before curfew most nights. She’s still friends with Regulus and Severus and Cissa during the day time, until around sunset, but her nights are her own. It’ll be four years before someone comes with her to the Astronomy Tower, and it won’t be them.

There is excited murmuring in the halls the day the Yule Ball is announced, but she isn’t old enough to go, so what’s the point? Regulus and Sev aren’t either, so they spend the night playing Exploding Snap until the last stragglers come down at two AM.

(They’re still the first to wake up and open presents the next day.)

Evangeline gets Honeydukes chocolate from her brothers, a sweater from family tradition, a long letter from her parents, and an apology from Molly because there still aren’t any nieces. Regulus gives her a biography of Kennilworthy Whisp. Severus gives her a slab of caramel Honeydukes chocolate, but she doesn’t eat it until she proves he didn’t leave the castle to do it.

Ev doesn’t mind not having any nieces, much, but both her friends are boys and Cissa’s too wrapped up in her family’s drama to be much fun. Her older sister Andromeda eloped. With a Muggleborn. (She thinks she’s getting a clearer picture of what that means.)

Regulus is pale, but dodges her questions well. From what she understands, when he Floo’d home for Christmas dinner, he sat next to Bellatrix instead of Andromeda. Oh, and he now hates mincemeat pie.

The cold settles in, which stiffens Evangeline’s resolve to get better grades. Severus spends all his time brewing and experimenting in the Potions lab, Cissa hasn’t come back since New Year’s, and Regulus is moody enough that she’s spending all her time with Remus. (They reverted to first names the third time they sat together in the library.)

Sirius teases them sometimes, but they aren’t either of them thirteen, so there isn’t much point besides making Regulus incoherent with rage whenever he hears it.

Valentine’s Day arrives with a rush of emotions and heartbreak and tears,as it is often wont to do. James Potter is stalking Lily Evans with a ferocity that makes Lily role her eyes, Sev grow dark and moody, and Sirius roar with laughter. Ev is tempted to remind them that Lily’s thirteen and James twelve, but opts for sitting back and watching the show.

Narcissa gets a large, ostentatious valentine from Malfoy, which has a tag that reads “my mother bought it”. Evangeline gets a bar of Honeydukes caramel-filled chocolate. Her favorite, but she doesn’t mention it to anyone. 

Sirius gives Regulus a bigger valentine than Malfoy’s to Cissa, but bigger ones still to his best friends. Ev spends all of three seconds comforting Reg before he and Severus go after the “marauders”. (It was Peter who made up the name after Sev called them marauding slime. They thought it sounded cool except for the slime part.)

The spring arrives with a passion, and four days of driving rain ensure that all the snow except for some hollows in the Forbidden Forest is gone. Exams suddenly loom on the horizon. Sev isn’t letting anyone help him pick his new classes.


End file.
